The moralistic and even puritanical tone that runs through these secular prophecies — one can almost hear the jarring cadences of the King James Bible murmuring in the background — can become, well, a little tedious. We have to re-equilibrate ourselves with the ecosystem (Weisman); we have to develop more resilient communities and pursue more open, collaborative ways of making decisions (Homer-Dixon); we have to live more humble, spiritually attuned lives (Joseph). None of them seems to suggest that we find less destructive ways of leading totally indulgent lives, although Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at CIBC World Markets, comes close. He clearly appreciates the good things the executive class enjoys in the twenty-first century, such as fine wine, alpine skiing, and fishing at exclusive lodges in the Yukon. Nonetheless, in Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (2009), he argues that the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels, especially oil, will drive up prices, and will have dramatic consequences for how even the wealthy live their lives. Much of our lifestyle, he points out regretfully, depends on a fuel-intensive transportation system that will fail once the price of oil goes through the ceiling, to $140 a barrel and beyond; we will have to rely on regional food in its proper season, and locally manufactured products.
But if Rubin seems only moderately outraged over the wastefulness of, say, an indoor ski hill in Dubai, former New York Times war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges can summon up enough prophetic rage to compete with Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel combined. In the introduction to his latest book, The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress (2011), Hedges — who attended Harvard Divinity School and whose father was a minister — acknowledges that, freed from traditional journalism, he essentially writes sermons. And they are as passionate as they are blunt. “In the past, when civilizations went belly up through greed, mismanagement, and the exhaustion of natural resources,” he writes in Death of the Liberal Class (2010), “human beings migrated somewhere else to pillage anew. But this time the game is over. There is nowhere else to go… We will disintegrate together. The ten-thousand-year experiment of settled life is about to come crashing to a halt.” For Hedges, human survival will depend upon creating small, sustainable communities. He suggests that Canada will be a better place to do this than the United States (and, fortunately for him, he is married to a Canadian, the actress Eunice Wong), but he doesn’t expect it to be easy. Survival will require moral resolve and a willingness to defy those in power. “As distinct moral beings, we will endure only through these small, sometimes imperceptible acts of defiance,” he writes. “This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what mass culture and mass propaganda seek to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces, we have a chance, if not for ourselves then for those who follow.”
The prognosis offered by climate scientist and writer Tim Flannery in his new book, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, is softer and more hopeful. For Flannery, the earth (including us) is a self-regulating, living system, or Gaia, that has evolved its own modes of co-operation and balance; the problem now is that human profligacy has radically disrupted it. But that need not be permanent. “If our civilization does survive this century,” he writes, “I believe its future prospects will be profoundly enhanced, for this is the moment of our greatest peril.” He imagines a mid-term future in which genetic differences have disappeared, a universal language is in place, and the much-reduced human population is united under a single government, thereby increasing the likelihood of good common decision making. The one thing he remains certain of, however, is that “if we do not strive to love one another, and to love our planet as much as we love ourselves, then no further human progress is possible here on earth.”
he difficulty with prophecies — whether based on passages from the Bible or ancient calendars, on solid climate science and economics or the visions of the Mongolian shamans Lawrence E. Joseph visited while researching his books — is that they are almost invariably wrong. Human beings are remarkably bad at predicting even relatively short-term, simple occurrences, such as the weather on Monday or the price of gold on Friday, much less something as vast and complex as the future of humanity. Many important events of the recent past came as a surprise to most people: World War I, the stock market crash of 1929, the Cold War, the computer age, the economic meltdown of 2008, the Arab Awakening, even the Occupy Wall Street movement. Part of the problem, as Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out in the eighteenth century, is that we are equipped with a concept of “cause” that constitutes little more than an association of things or events in the past — and projecting the patterns of the past onto the future is perilous. We read books of narrative history and biography and get the impression that what made things happen, what shaped the story, was always sharply defined and clear, when in fact it wasn’t and more likely still isn’t. The real problem with the future is that it doesn’t yet exist, and the forces that bring it into existence are too complicated, too subtle and volatile and fractal, for us to know in advance — or ever.And yet we continue to try. Why? Because we need to have a sense that we control our fates, even if all that means is that we know our fates. And because we need to believe we are part of a story with a larger meaning, that vice is rewarded with punishment, that redemption is possible, that history is not random and empty, that a higher power (whether Isaiah’s wrathful God or simply the natural world) exacts the final judgment. The current proliferation of prophetic books and films and movements suggests an anxiety peculiar to this moment. In 1987, we could happily sing along with the REM anthem “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” believing the party would go on indefinitely in some form or other. But the mood going into 2012 is considerably darker, and we don’t feel fine. There are things we really don’t want to disappear — for instance, the King James Bible, Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes, sturdy country houses, huge roast turkeys with everyone we love gathered around — in the transition to what Joseph chirpily refers to as “whatever dimension of existence happens to come next,” and we may be on the road to losing all of them and more.
While we may be unable to reliably prophesy the future and the prospect of ruined cities, anarchy, and mass death still seems a remote, nightmarish vision (fodder for Hollywood producers and unhinged radio hosts), most of us sense that the huge, overcomplicated world we have created is unsustainable in the long run, and the practical solutions commonly proposed — smaller, self-contained communities; eco-friendly architecture; smart cars; banking regulations — pale before the encroaching tsunami of problems. It is easy to feel overwhelmed, confused, weary, and crushingly sad. In this context, the idea of the Apocalypse can be comforting. At least then, the human story, swinging unstably as it does between heights of imagination and bottomless depths of depravity, doesn’t end, as T. S. Eliot’s bleak The Hollow Men would have it, with a whimper. Yet amid all the fire and brimstone, all the prophecies of our ruin, there is almost always a glimmer of hope that we can right the misfortunes we have brought upon ourselves. “For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace,” Isaiah proclaims, speaking of the moment when human beings are brought back into accord with God’s word, and for many the same could be said for humanity’s reunion with the natural world: “The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”
